Science at play: The Khine Lab at UCI

Michelle Khine, left, a UC Irvine associate professor of biomedical engineering, holds up a heat gun as her graduate students jokingly shrink wrap Himanshu Sharma in their lab. Khine makes extensive use of the "shrinky-dink" method in her research.EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

The Khine research lab at UC Irvine invents cool tools for the medical industry by “playing around.”

Biomedical engineer Michelle Khine, who designs medical diagnostic microchips that can be used to analyze cells, is an advocate of play. It was the theme of her recent TEDxUCIrvine talk.

“By playing we can learn,” she said. “We play music, we play tennis, we play sports. Why can't we play science?”

By “playing around” – experimenting and thinking creatively, embracing uncertainty and simply having fun – the lab inadvertently came up with anti-wetting “super-hydrophobic” surfaces that are resistant to blood and water.

The Khine lab website has a video of a water droplet literally bouncing off the surface and rolling away.

“It's a work-hard, play-hard kind of lab,” said Natasha Felsinger, who has worked in the lab for a year. Felsinger recently graduated with a bachelor's in biomedical engineering but resumed work in the Khine lab this fall on her way to a master's degree.

“Everyone is constantly trying different and new things in the lab. It's very creative,” Felsinger said.

The Khine lab also invented 3-D surfaces that have microsized pits, which are useful tools for researchers who need uniform cultures of stem cells or tumor cells.

Flexible, wearable electronic health monitors, made of thin plastics that conform to your body, as opposed to hard silicon wafer electronics, are another Khine lab venture.

Khine's research field is informally known as “lab on a chip.” Its future, Khine said, is spitting on a chip that was purchased at a pharmacy and receiving vital information about your health.

You can't talk about Michelle Khine without mentioning Shrinky Dinks, those art-and-craft activity kits that shrink pictures drawn on flexible plastic sheets when heated in an oven. Shrinky Dinks have been around since the 1970s, and Khine counts it as one of her favorite childhood activities.

Before coming to UCI in 2009, Khine grabbed headlines for playing with Shrinky Dinks in her lab at UC Merced. It was there, as a young, junior professor, that she realized that advancing her research was a matter of publish or perish.

“I decided to go back to basics,” she said.

She made complex designs using 3-D design software, printed them on thermoplastic Shrinky Dinks sheets with a laser-jet printer and heated them in a toaster oven to create a “microfluidic” tool to manipulate cells in tiny amounts of fluids for diagnostic purposes.

“All I wanted to do is make a poor man's version of the silicon wafer.”

Michelle Khine, left, a UC Irvine associate professor of biomedical engineering, holds up a heat gun as her graduate students jokingly shrink wrap Himanshu Sharma in their lab. Khine makes extensive use of the "shrinky-dink" method in her research. EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Michelle Khine, left, a UC Irvine associate professor of biomedical engineering, holds up a heat gun as her graduate students jokingly shrink wrap Himanshu Sharma in their lab. Khine makes extensive use of the "shrinky-dink" method in her research. EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
UC Irvine associate professor of biomedical engineering Michelle Khine poses with shrink wrap rolls and a heat gun in her lab. Khine makes extensive use of the "shrinky-dink" method in her research. EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Jolie McLane, a graduate student of UC Irvine associate professor Michelle Khine, holds up a super-hydrophobic plastic developed in Khine's biomedical engineering lab. EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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